Archives: Persephone Forum

Slight and grey-haired, in a cool grey dress, relaxing in a shabby wicker chair under the lime trees, Mrs Fowler keeps a pile of books on a table beside her to ‘dip into’. A Persephone reader before her time (one can almost picture a few pale grey covers in the pile), she is immediately sympathetic as a character. Stout Mrs Willoughby wears rich dark silk, has heavy mahogany furniture and does not think much of novelists, ‘they were people who wasted their time writing novels so that other people might waste their time reading them’. She would not be on the Persephone Biannually mailing list. Two women in their late forties, both widows, young widows by today’s standards, each with five children of similar ages, they have nothing else in common apart from some shared grandchildren, to whom Mrs Willoughby, with no justification, lays the greater claim.

 

At first everything about the Fowler household seems as attractive as the Willoughby ménage is off-putting.  The fading colours, the soft, slightly sagging furniture, the welcoming fire even in June, the books, the aged cook, all suggest the quiet, easy confidence of old, if much reduced, money. Langley Park is a house which has known better days, whose rural setting has been encroached on by new developments, but which still retains one good view, away from the town, where the Willoughbys live, at The Beeches, a house in which ‘nothing was allowed to grow shabby or faded as it was at Langley Place’.  The Willoughby money is ‘new’, flowing from their ‘monstrous’ paper-mill which looms over Bellington. They don’t just live in Bellington, they are Bellington, pillars of Bellington society. Unsurprisingly Mrs Willoughby considers the Fowlers to be lacking in the solid civic virtues. ‘All they ever seemed to do for the community was to hold a fête in aid of the Conservative Party in their garden each summer, an occasion that was, in Mrs Willoughby’s opinion, more a display of their roses and sweet peas than of their public spirit.’

It is Mrs Fowler who describes the family as  ‘a sort of roundabout’, characteristically accepting an inevitability in the way patterns repeat themselves from generation to generation. Juliet Aykroyd makes the point in her preface, that roundabouts exert centrifugal as well as cohesive force. Here we have two families, two roundabouts, each spinning around the still point of a powerful matriarch: the late Messrs Fowler and Willoughby have left little trace. Mrs Fowler relies on the natural centrifugal pull to keep her brood together, making no obvious effort, and ultimately with only limited success, while Mrs Willoughby gives the laws of physics a helping hand, using her own tight reins to maintain her hold on as many aspects of her children’s lives as she is able, a hold which, to her chagrin, will not prove strong enough to restrain her grown-up grandchildren.

It is hard to warm to Mrs W.  She is not a kindly mother: ‘she either ignored you or turned on you the full and blasting force of her authority’, but her disciplinary approach was not unusual for its time.  She shows some indulgence towards her sons, eventually, but too late, relaxing her grip on the younger, and showing a glimmering of psychological insight into the older: ‘she had few illusions about him, but she had found that if you persistently credited people with a quality they often ended by acquiring it’. To her daughters she gives no quarter; the submissive older ones buckle to her views on child rearing, furnishing, and fashion, while the youngest escapes only by a whisper a life as the family dogsbody. However, Mrs. W is not an unkind person. A host of poor relations form a regular part of the family circle, attending the regular Sunday suppers, which she prepares herself, and unostentatiously subsidizes from her own purse.  She makes a conscientious effort to understand Mrs Fowler, but fails.

Mrs. Fowler’s Sunday teas are more relaxed affairs, but they are prepared and served by loyal staff, and the circle of deck chairs is a small one: friends are welcome to drop by, but there is no place for dull needy relations.   As a mother she is uncritical and undemanding. When her favourite son, Peter, admits to an affair with his daughter’s nanny, she shows no disapproval, ‘only a depth of love and pity’ – the fact that nanny Rachel is a ‘lady’, while his wife, Belle, is an overdressed neurotic, with ‘a diseased appetite for flattery’, not unlike Lena in Saplings (Persephone Book No 16), may not be insignificant.

When her youngest daughter, Judy, returns home, pregnant, and alone having left her husband, she is welcoming and uninquisitive. Hers is a gentle but oddly passive style of mothering.

Having from the earliest days of her marriage decided to repress the more assertive side of her character, who she likes to call Millicent, in favour of  the more submissive, easy-going Millie, she is uncontrolling to a fault. Aware from their childhood of the jealousy festering between her daughters Anice and Helen, she did nothing. She ‘dimly understood the dark and obscure forces that had made Matthew [her eldest son]  hate Peter’ but stood back.  Towards Helen she is astonishingly cruel: when she notices her unhappiness (Helen rightly suspects her Willoughby husband of being unfaithful) she is surprised at the pain it causes her, noting that ‘it would have amused Millicent’!  What a good thing Millie, and not Millicent, did the mothering. At least the neglect was benign.  But it was neglect – from their earliest days taking them on picnics, she ‘would sit on the log, reading, completely forgetful of them’.  She is right to experience a ‘feeling of inadequacy with all her children’.  But she is imaginatively helpful to her grandchildren, and to Mrs Willoughby’s.

Richmal Crompton is not judgemental. It is clear that both women have their strengths and weaknesses, that benign neglect, though more beguiling, can be as damaging as iron control, that intuition can be as valuable to understanding as conscientious effort but that both are important, and that, in the end, children are as much a product of nature as of nurture.

One should not forget that both these women have suffered the loss of their husbands and the challenge of bringing up large families alone during turbulent years.  Matthew Fowler’s youthful (he was only 20 at the time of his father’s death) escape to Kenya must have been at least in part an escape from unwelcome responsibilities; Helen’s bossiness may be the result of a perceived need for someone to fill the gap. The reaction of the two youngest girls, only ten when their fathers died, is delayed but predictable. Judy’s unsuitable attraction to her godfather and the relationships that she and Cynthia have with the odious and vain, middle-aged novelist, Arnold Palmer, clearly suggest in both the need for a father figure. Later Judy finds solace for the loss of her brother, and the loss of her own childhood, by returning home to recreate, relive those years with her new baby.

Richmal Crompton observes but does not probe deeply into the impact of childhood bereavement. Child psychology was in its infancy: astonishingly Peter’s daughter, Gillian, is told only as a teenager that the man she thinks of as her father is in fact her uncle, and even more astonishingly receives the information with total equanimity. But she does write brilliantly about children, and for all that the subject matter of Family Roundabout is essentially serious, a rich vein of humour runs through it. The poor relations are almost Dickensian and the spirit of Crompton’s own William lives in Tim, whose reluctant appearance in white silk at his uncle Max’s wedding is memorable.

Written in 1948 and looking back to the period between the wars, Family Roundabout is noticeably silent about the war that has passed, and which the menfolk appear, remarkably to have survived. The coming of the next war is barely alluded to. Mrs Fowler can’t bear the possibility and is reassured by an article in a spiritualist magazine affirming that there will be no war, while equally typically, Mrs Willoughby dismisses the very idea because Hitler is nothing but a ‘common little upstart’.    But we can picture them in a few years time: Mrs Fowler will surely be a member, if not the most competent, of the Bellington sewing party, while Mrs Willoughby organises the billeting of evacuees. Crompton has created two very real characters.

Family Roundabout is a subtle novel. Problems of marriage and parenting and growing up and being a woman in a man’s world that form the focus of so many Persephone books are treated wisely but lightly.  It would be far from true to say that everyone lives happily ever after, but most accommodate themselves to their life, not perhaps the one they dreamt of, but one which will do, and whatever the drawbacks, has its compensations.

quotes … do share your favourites

 

‘It isn’t that she can’t fight, it’s that she can’t be bothered to. And the Willoughbys amuse her. She likes to see them in action. She’d put a few spokes in their wheel just for the fun of the thing, but not enough.’

‘Mrs Fowler and Mrs Willoughby were talking together in the middle of the lawn, but they suggested a couple of generals conducting a parley during an armed truce rather than heads of a united family.’

‘She had this feeling of uncertainty and inadequacy with all her children. She shrank from bringing pressure to bear on them in any way or obtruding on their privacy, and so, she suspected she often failed them. They wanted help and advice, and she had none to give … Her thoughts went t Mrs Willoughby. She can always give people advice. I’d be better if I had more of her in me. A little smile twitched her lips. And perhaps she’d be better if she had more of me in her …’

‘you can be a slave to freedom, you know darling, as to anything else.’

 

 

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No.3)

Saplings by Noel Streatfield (Persephone Book No.16)

They Knew Mr Knight  by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 19)

The New House  by Lettice Cooper (Persephone Book No. 47)

 

 

What other bloggers have said about this book:

The character I absolutely loved: Mrs Fowler. Such a gentle soul but with a fire that she has kept tamed over the course of her married life. …  She is the grandmotherly figure you want to run to when something is wrong.

The character who I loathed: Belle. One could maybe choose Helen or Mrs. Willoughby for this distinction, but they are both pussycats compared to the atrociously petty, self-centered Belle. God I hated her. A bit of an archetype, she is the one you would hiss at when she came on screen if this book were a film. (I wish.)  myporchblog

All the adults have issues stemming from their childhoods, affecting their parenting, and it made me wonder if adding a couple who had sufficiently dealt with their issues and who were, on the whole, good parents though not infallible would have made a difference to the novel. On second thought, though, I don’t think it would because even children raised in good homes make poor choices later in life. After all, it’s part of being human to fail sometimes. Furthermore, probably nobody sufficiently deals with their issues enough so that they don’t affect any children they may have. aliterarywayfarer

And Crompton has a wonderful ability to portray characters of great depth and breadth. They each have very unique characteristics, personalities and voices, so even though the cast of characters was long, I never felt confused by them all. There’s a subtle humor to the story as well. It’s not necessarily laugh out loud funny, but Crompton didn’t seem to take her characters too overly serious either. She reminded me just a tiny bit of Barbara Pym. danitorrestypepad

Only very occasionally does the Persephone Forum find itself ‘in sync’ with the Thursday afternoon Reading Group at Lamb’s Conduit Street. It is rewarding and informative when it does, and a pleasure for the Country Cousin to meet Persephone readers in the flesh.  I hope I am not misrepresenting the group when I say that we all admitted to a slight reluctance to picking up a volume of poetry, generally preferring the ‘total immersion’ of the novel.

Short stories meet with similar, initial, reluctance. The last time Forum and Reading Group coincided was over Tell it to a Stranger, a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Berridge (Persephone Book No. 15). We agreed that, once started, we found it difficult not to rush on to the next story, with the result that, though we loved them, we found that with a few notable exceptions, there was a slight tendency to confuse one with another.  We decided then that ‘little and often’ was by far the better approach, and one which ideally we should adopt with poetry.

The short story connection was in fact twofold.  While encapsulating many of the scenes and experiences of Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson (Persephone Book No. 9), Consider the Years  reminded us quite as much of  Tell it to a Stranger, and Mollie Panter-Downes’ Good Evening Mrs Craven, The Wartime Stories (Persephone Book No. 8). The Speaker, a latter day ‘recruiting officer’ in Sound the Trumpet,  urging her audience into the factories or the forces, ‘If Russia can do it, surely we can too’, could have stepped straight out of Good Evening Mrs Craven, together with her eager audience who

 

…. beat their pointed umbrellas like tom-toms on the floor.

            (Their ages averaged, roughly, sixty-four).

 

 

Some of the poems are short stories. ‘Air Raid Over Bristol’ has a small but full cast of characters, worried shopkeepers, the know-all grocer focusing his binoculars, the anxious granny, and in the starring role, the WVS Food Officer (a self-portrait?), trying hard to maintain a stiff upper lip, dutifully keeping up the spirits of others, ‘They have superb shelters in all the schools, I believe’;  while convinced that she is about to die, inconsequentially removing candle grease from her coat lining. Throughout the drama, which could, in reality, have turned into a tragedy, our heroine never forgets the purpose of her visit,

 

            (Madam, do you keep your pig-food in a separate bin?

            It is a sin

            against the nation not to preserve each bone.)

 

When the all clear sounds and others scour the street for shrapnel, she can hold her head up high,

 

             I bow to the proprietress of the shop,

            and now that I mysteriously feel such a credit to the nation

            I hand her a leaflet on Salvage from the Corporation.

 

The women (they are mostly women) in Virginia Graham’s poems display a sort of dogged courage, fighting, with small acts of defiance, on their own front. In Occupied Paris women wore their best hats and brightest lipstick. The ‘grand old girl’, in ‘Final Gesture’ stands her ground:

 

No, dear, I will not eat in the scullery!

I will go down with my colours flying.

 

‘One must keep gay if one can and try not get one’s thoughts hopelessly embedded in war affairs’, Virginia wrote to Joyce Grenfell. If a stiff upper lip was undoubtedly a useful part of her armour, as it was for so many, it was also a sort of weapon.

 

On a personal level, judging from her letters to Joyce Grenfell, she didn’t have a bad war. Her husband survived; their flat in London, other than having the stairs covered in glass ‘from some bomb or other’, which made her very ‘kloss’, was undamaged. The worst of it was having to move to Bristol for a few months, a blow perhaps softened by taking her cook and housemaid with her. Virginia may have had to make do but she didn’t have to do a great deal of mending (when her cook, not the same one, retired in 1991, she taught VG, now eighty, how to heat up food from Marks and Spencer). She led a privileged life, but money, though useful, did not protect her from loneliness, or loss, or fear.

At the beginning of the war Virginia was 28 and newly married to Tony Thesiger, who joined up with an anti-aircraft unit in Bristol.   She knew the plight of The Depressed Bride, alone in the new home, where ‘with the wedding silver I shall eat’:

 

 

‘…. Our substantiated dream,

            the freshly painted walls, the covers cream,

            the yellow curtains hanging crisply new,     

            the pale unfurnished shelves with books askew’.

 

She sympathised with those who were made to leave London, to give up

 

… noise, and lights, and little corner shops,

            And fuggy cinemas and sooty rain ..

 

Her dislike of  country life – for she was as devoted to London as any East End evacuee – dated from before the war and did not diminish when it was forced upon her.  Nature did not stir her soul and she hated the cold.  ‘Now That You Live in the Country’ still strikes a chord:

 

You’ll believe you’re the selfsame person,

               but no, as the years unfold

            you’ll get hotter and hotter,

               and your visitors colder than cold.

 

The bouncy rhythm of Four Little Miles does not altogether hide the fear behind the lines:

 

‘Oh, pity us who only share

            The same bombardment from the air.’   

 

 

Virginia Graham was not a stay-at-home wife, not one of the Ladies in Waiting: what a gift she had for titles – Autumn Leaves, those furloughs too short for any meaningful communication; Lebensraum, not a nationalistic ambition, but memories of a childhood bedroom, requisitioned as a military billet; The Answer’s in the Negative, a touching description of moist photographs of absent sons, hanging askew in bathrooms.  She joined the Women’s Voluntary Service  as a driver in 1939 (Joyce Grenfell thought she looked most attractive in the bottle-green tweed uniform), giving up matinees and quiet strolls along the Mall to

 

…go to Wanstead Flats

            with bales of straw, or a cargo of tin hats…

 

wondering, like many of her fellow volunteers in this ‘espèce d’organisation de femmes’ (her poems in French are as witty as her English verse – real French but very English humour), what, after the war, she might tell her grandchildren:

 

How can I convince them that it was to England’s good

            that I went to Waterloo to meet two goats travelling from Camberley,

            and drove them in a car across to  Victoria, where I put them in another train,

            third class, non-smoker of course, to Amberley?

 

 

Virginia Graham knew she was one of the lucky ones,

 

‘We who have husbands at home should be very quiet,

            for we do not know

            the meaning of days ….’

 

 

We Who Have Husbands at Home,  is a moving poem, which uses her ‘trademark’ bathos to powerful effect:

 

‘Let us not speak

            too loudly of war restrictions and rationing and the black-out

            for there are eyes that seek

            empty horizons, skies and deserts and sad grey seas,

            and a sign from God,

            while we who have husbands at home look in the shops

            for wool perhaps or cod.’

 

Her range is remarkably wide, from comic verse: ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ ,is the sad lament of an Opera House Rhinemaiden:

 

We strive with our arms to display all the charms

               Of sirens who lounge upon rocks,

            But our legs are congealed and our bosoms concealed

               In the most uprovocative frocks.

 

to poems which seem to be serious, but have a twist in the final lines. The ‘Prayer to Ceres’, begging for all her bounteous gifts, but ‘please, please, PLEASE, no more plums’;  a deliberately mawkish reflection on friendship and love is brought firmly down to earth:

 

‘Tis love alone makes the world go round,

            And so, of course does a double rum

            Thoughtlessly poured on an empty tum.’

 

 

and at the other end of the spectrum some which are genuinely serious.

 

Some of the post-war poems vividly convey a feeling of grim exhaustion. Victory is not to be celebrated unreservedly. Like many others Virginia Graham reacted with shock and despair to the dropping of the atom bomb and to what was perceived as the ‘sell-out’ of Eastern Europe to the Soviets. There is irritation at the return of the old order, as the rich who had spent the war in country houses ‘leased at such vast cost’, reclaim the city, the theatre seats, the restaurant seats and he taxi seats. And fury at the inadequacy of the public (a particularly insensitive section of the public) reaction to the revealed horrors of the concentration camps. A note accompanying a parcel to one who has lost everything ends on a note of bitter humour,

 

            I, full of compassion, send for your comfort,

            Two of my husband’s vests and a pair of old tennis shoes.

 

Should we heed Virginia Graham’s own words and refrain from using the term poem. ‘I have been writing verse for a number of years, but I have never yet succeeded in writing a poem’. ‘Poets are inspired from within,’ she continues, ‘whereas writers of verse are more observers of the outward and visible things of life’.  She is a brilliant observer of life, with a finely tuned ear, a sharp eye, and a glorious ability to create word pictures, not least in that self-deprecating assessment of her own talent: ‘We verse-makers, therefore, are really the hack-workers of the profession, and when the Muse visits us, she is merely slumming.’ One can almost see lofty Calliope stepping gingerly through the grime, brushing aside the strung out washing.

For a writer with such an easy way with rhythm and metre, and a serious grasp of verse form – her parody Kipling’s ‘If’ is brilliant – she is absurdly modest.

She was also irrepressibly witty and many of the ‘entries’ (what are we to call them? I still incline to poems) were written for Punch, that is for an intelligent reader looking to be amused more than to be moved, to share such comedy as could be found in times that were essentially tragic. A wry smile is not an invalid response.

 

 

 

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

Somewhere there must be women reading books,

and talking of chicken rissoles to their cooks …

(‘Somewhere in England’)

 

The moment is gone now, it is past recall;

But we walked there in the sweetest scented breeze,

And I spoke, I know at some length of evacuees,

And you of the maps you had pinned with flags to your wall,

I think, my friend, more than this was expected of us.

(‘Missed Opportuniy’)

 

Oh, were the socks and jumpers lain out flat

Together side by side,

With all the undies and the crocheted shawls,

They’d cover ninety times with ninety palls

The heart of every bride

Who has to stay at home for once and tat!

(‘Ladies in Waiting’)

 

 

Regardez, madame, cette jupe d’une simplicité exquise,

      D’une serge bleu marin – très jeune, très écolière !

Et je parie que Madame aura l’air d’un Marquise

      Dans ce balaclava de poil de dromadaire.

 

A la fin, je vous offre, comme pièce de résistance,

      Des sabots ! Une plaisanterie extrèmement gaie !

Ils sont d’une incommodité immense,

      Mais là-dedans vous marcherez vers la paix.

(‘Our Winter Collection’)

 

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

It’s Hard to be Hip over Thirty  by Judith Viorst  (Persephone Book No:12)

Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles (Persephone Book No:36)

Amours de Voyage  by Arthur Hugh Clough (Persephone Book No:82)

 

 

What other bloggers have said about this book:

….you probably won’t know Virginia Graham as a recognized poet, or even as a famous person  (but Persephone Books has republished the book, bless them!), and I must warn beforehand that you should not expect unique, unforgettable poetry à la Shakespeare. Does any English expression translate the French “vers de mirliton”? It means childish verses, funny puns and poetry not intended to be highbrow or literary at all…

… The poetry equivalent of the beloved slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On”. In short, a short poetry ration when you see disaster around and still have to carry on with your day even if your heart is heavy, like these days in face of tragedy. smithereens